Maine has remarked that investigators of the differences between stationary and progressive societies must, at the outset, realize clearly the fact that the stationary condition of the human race is the rule, the progressive the exception; and when this reflection was made, the condition of the greater part of Asia and of Northern Africa might even have justified the proposition that a retrograde condition of the human race was the rule. In the wildest regions frequented by the nomad hordes of Central Asia, the traveller discovers the vestiges of former cultivation and wealth. But he can now perceive in such regions that while he stands on the grave of an old civilisation he stands also on the borders of a new one. It seems certain, at least as regards Asia, which contains the bulk of the human race, that not only the stationary, but the retrograde communities will become progressive-will be reached by roads, railways, river navigation, and Western commerce, and obtain the aid of Western capital and skill. And it seems equally certain that the pecuniary value of their produce will immensely increase; that they will need vast quantities of coin for its circulation; and that the question is one of importance, whether coin enough for the purpose will be easily obtained. The steady decline in the produce of the gold-fields of Victoria, from 2,761,528 ounces in 1857 to 1,557,397 ounces in 1864, might seem at first to justify a doubt on the subject; and the existence of a great gold region near the sources of the Nile, on which some writers have reckoned, is in Sir Roderick Murchison's opinion contravened by the evidence of Captain Speke respecting the geological structure of the country. But the decline in the production of gold in Victoria has arisen rather from the migration of miners to New South Wales and New Zealand than from a diminishing fertility of the mines. In fact, the gold-fields of Victoria yielded more in proportion to the number of labourers in 1864 than in either of the previous years; 97,942 miners obtaining 1,702,460 oz. in 1862; 92,292 obtaining 1,578,079 oz. in 1863; and 83,394 obtaining 1,557,397 oz. in 1864. And in 1857, when the gold yield of Victoria reached its maximum, that of New South Wales only amounted to the value of £674,470; whereas it has been more than three times. as much on the average for the last three years. From the Western States of North America, again, the supply of the precious metals seems likely to increase. In a recent report, the British Consul at San Francisco states it as his belief that even in California the production of the precious metals will increase

1 In some of the districts of the Australian mines the yield has lately fallen off, but solely by reason of the scarcity of water, not of gold.

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for many years to come; and that when to this is added the produce of the rich mines of Nevada, Idabo, Arizona, and Oregon, there can be no doubt that the total increase will be very great. This anticipation seems confirmed by the fact that the exports of treasure from San Francisco in the fiscal year ending in June 1864, amounted to the value of 51,264,023 dols.; the larger proportion being in the latter half of the period, and the entire sum being considerably greater than in any other year since 1856. From Mexico and South America great additional supplies may also be expected. Of Peru the British Consul says “Peru is one vast mine which the hand of man has only hitherto scratched." To the produce of the mines must further be added the vast sums that the progress of commerce will restore to circulation from the hoards of Asia and Europe, which, even in such places as Lapland, are great. Large sums of Norwegian money are said by Mr. Laing, in his Journal of a Residence in Norway, to have disappeared in Lapland; the wealthiest Laplanders having always been accustomed to live, like the poorest, on the produce of their reindeer, and to bury the money coming to them from Norway in places where their heirs often fail to discover it.

The movement we have discussed is one which tends to bring all buried and neglected riches to light; and we anticipate from it both an ample provision of money and an increasing demand for it.

ART. III.-1. Memoirs, Miscellanies, and Letters of the late Lucy Aikin. Edited by P. H. LE BRETON. Longmans, 1864. 2. Fugitive Verses. By JOANNA BAILLIE. Moxon, 1864. 3. Selections from the Letters of Caroline Frances Cornwallis. London: Trübner and Co., 1864.

IT cannot be doubted that a marked difference in the relations of the female sex to the literary culture of the day, as compared with the state of things two generations back, is one result of the intellectual march of the present century. Female authorship is far more common than it was, is far more enterprising than it was; it is more business-like, and has less of the flutter of self-consciousness; while, by a natural consequence, it attracts far less of special notice and compliment than it formerly did. For we must not overstate the case as regards the discouragement which the woman of letters is generally supposed to have received from the ruling sex. Ladies who belonged to a favoured clique were sure, in olden times as well as now, of credit and renown. Poor Mrs. Elstob, one of the first Saxon scholars of her day, could indeed pine in drudgery and obscurity, but Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, Fanny Burney, with a select circle of attendant nymphs great in the minor morals, were praised up to and beyond their deserts; and though "F. B." confined herself to novel-writing, a department in which women have always been allowed certain chartered rights, and Mrs. Chapone and Miss Talbot were strictly feminine in their aspirations, yet the authoress of the Essay on Shakspeare, and the translator of Epictetus, boldly trenched on ground which, in those days at all events, masculine intellects considered exclusively their own. When angry, it is true, Johnson could speak hard words of Mrs. Montagu's Latin and Greek; but the wonderful feat of translating Epictetus seems to have placed Mrs. Carter on a pedestal which even the surly dictator did not grudge her, though possibly her discreet backwardness in exposing her acquirements to the ordeal of conversation may have had something to do with his indulgence. "My old friend Mrs. Carter," he said, "could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus from the Greek, and work a handkerchief as well as compose a poem." . . . "He thought, however," adds Boswell, "that she was too reserved in conversation upon subjects she was so eminently able to converse upon, which was occasioned by her modesty and fear of giving offence."

No doubt, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the women of the upper classes were, taken as a whole, more rational and capable beings than they had been in the days of the Spectator.

In one of the conversations recorded by Fanny Burney, we find Dr. Johnson expressing in strong terms his sense of the advance made within his own recollection. "He told them he well remembered when a woman who could spell a common letter was regarded as all-accomplished; but now they vied with the men in everything." Still we cannot turn over the familiar correspondence of the miniature Sapphos and Hypatias of Johnson's time, without discerning how strongly the consciousness of special merit worked within them. We see it in the ostentatious modesty which is sometimes more significant than braggart boasting; we see it in the little pedantries of style and allusion with which they trick out the merest commonplace of sentiment. For real scholarlike appreciation of the subjects they deal with, we should look in vain in the lucubrations of the most renowned female students of that day:-poor Mrs. Elstob, already referred to, whose Anglo-Saxon researches really were worth something, never attained worldly repute. The conclusions they draw from their own investigations into the wellsprings of knowledge are mostly moralizings of a general cast, trite and jejune we should now say; but then it is fair to remember that there was a very strong and prevailing bent among all thinkers, shallow and deep, towards moral and metaphysical didactics in that age, and the "Rambler" himself could utter pompous platitudes sometimes.

But to revert to our argument. Allowing that a change had taken place in the intellectual position of the weaker sex, between the era of Addison and that of Johnson, there has assuredly been a change also no less distinctly perceptible in its position between Johnson's days and our own, and one that has been proceeding at a vastly accelerated pace within the last fiveand-thirty years. The date of the Reform Bill, though it seems but as yesterday to many still in the full vigour of life, carries us back to an antiquated world in many respects; in this among others. The literary atmosphere was still reverberating with the echoes of the poetry and romance which had glorified the long years of European strife and agitation. But Byron was in his recent grave; Scott was wielding with a paralysed hand the pen that had fascinated the heads and hearts of his generation; Southey had written the last of his epics, and people had almost ceased to read them. Wordsworth was the poet of the day; but his admirers were comparatively few and select. His muse was placid and meditative; the shout of the Forum was to be raised in honour of other deities than those of Parnassus. Science, education for the masses, political enfranchisement, became the prevailing topics in men's mouths. Sentiment 1 Diary of Madame D'Arblay, vol. i. p. 277.

yielded to utility, the illusions of chivalry to hard material progress. A certain scarcely disguised superciliousness in the tone hitherto assumed towards science by men who had been brought up in the poetical and historical cultivation of the Georgian era, now gave way to a much more respectful appreciation of her claims. The old prejudices against the 'ologies rapidly disappeared. The classification of plants and stones, hitherto in the polite world looked upon as little more than an elegant diversion for idle hours, assumed a more serious significance as means towards unlocking creation's mysteries. The history of the earth's formation was becoming a subject to be feared, indeed, in the eyes of many, but no longer to be despised.

It was from about this same epoch, as we take it, that the term "blue-stocking," first applied in the Johnsonian society to ladies of literary pretension or acquirement, began to grow obsolete. In the intensified zest and value for practical and scientific knowledge which now set in, the world came to forget its prejudices of sex as well as of caste, and to prize any contribution to the current stock of information for what it was worth. This, at least, was the tendency of things; but, as always happens, the force of new principles began to be felt long before they effectually leavened the general mass of opinion; and it was not for many a year after the Society for the "Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," and the "Library of Entertaining" ditto, and Penny Magazines, and Mrs. Marcet's Popular Conversations on Science, and Miss Martineau's Tales illustrative of the Principles of Political Economy, had instructed the minds of the new generation, that the authoress who ventured on any ground save that of fiction or mild ethical rede, ceased to be regarded by a considerable portion of society as something of an unfeminine intruder, a "blue," and a pretender, probably superficial and certainly presumptuous.

Our reflections on this subject have been prompted by two publications of the past year: the Memoir and Letters of Miss Aikin, and the Letters of Miss Cornwallis. Both these ladies died within the last seven years; both lived through the period of which we have been speaking; and both reflected very distinctly, in the tone of their minds and the bent of their studies, the character of that period in its successive stages of development. Circumstances and natural disposition, however, had affixed considerable differences between them. The one, long known to the world as a historical writer of some pretension, and a friend and correspondent of several eminent literary characters of her day, had outlived her maximum of reputation; and that reputation had been perhaps a little enhanced by the odour of "blue" notoriety still attaching to petticoated authors